Facebookers outraged over undercover FBI agents posing as "friends"

http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/city-news/fbi-undercover-facebook/
"The AP mentions the Los Angeles case in which federal prosecutors unsuccessfully moved against a woman, Lori Drew, for posing as a teen boy on MySpace and then allegedly harassing a 13-year-old neighborhood girl who later hanged herself. She was nabbed for allegedly violating MySpace's terms of service -- posing as someone she isn't -- and convicted in L.A. before a higher-court judge overturned the ruling.
Aren't federal poseurs on Facebook doing the same thing Drew did? Facebook has a similar rule against giving false information when opening an account on the site."

Aaah... Facebook drama. On a list of websites I hate most, Facebook is right at the top. But that's a story for another article.

The internet is often considered a place of anonymity, where people can do what they please without fear of offline consequences. However, I don't sympathize with these people.

Facebook is a strict place with strict rules. If they expected anonymity there they thought wrong, very, very wrong. I've seen this since the first time I researched Facebook, that it was not a place to be anonymous.

Secondly, people seem to be forgetting that these are the authorities, not civilians, and certainly not bound to the same laws as civilians. The law for civilians does not automatically apply to the authorities, and it's their job to decide what is appropriate.

There is a huge difference between an undercover cop on facebook that adds suspected criminals and things like that in hopes of obtaining useful information and a lady who pretends to be someone else for the sake of harassing people and causing harm.

I support the FBIs ability to do this. Furthermore, unless you're a criminal, they probably are not going to randomly add you and start leeching info from you. This is logic. So if you're not a criminal, in the same boat as myself, then you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of this affecting your privacy.

As for criminals that abuse their privacy to break the law, what right do they have to that privacy anyway? It's their criminal choices, their consequences, and their life they screwed up. They tried to abuse the safety of their rights to privacy to screw other people over, and it's people like them that are the reason we have to deal with officials wanting to reduce privacy in the first place. I for one love the idea of one of these people being behind bars.